Gail Segal
Gail Segal is a writer and filmmaker. Her film work includes the Peabody Award winning documentary, Arguing the World (Assoc. Prod.), and the 15-part television series, The Shakespeare Hour, hosted by the late Walter Matthau (Assoc. Prod). Soapy, a documentary short about a small town barber in the Deep South aired on PBS in the fall of 2010. In 1989, she earned an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. Her first book of poems, In Gravity’s Pull, was published in 2002 (IML Publications) and a chapbook, The Discreet Charm of Prime Numbers, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.
In the company of Italian landscape painters she met Alfredo de Palchi who invited her to translate poems featured in his collection: Paradigm: New and Selected Poems, 1947-2009. Her most recent work includes a documentary film about the agency of women artisans in Turkey. She is currently in pre-production on a narrative short set in the Empty Quarter of the U.A.E., and a narrative feature based on her original screenplay about a family in the farm country of Southwest Georgia. For years, Gail has been training young directors in the Graduate Division of Film and Television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
In Gravity's Pull
Winner Of The Janet Panner Lewis Poetry Award 2002
Settling into the force of earthly experience is the project of Gail Segal’s first manuscript of poems, In Gravity’s Pull. The poems chart a landscape where “soft motherlight” mixes with “patches of mucilaginous waste.” “Lilies scatter like an epidemic.” “Stars” are weighted with “lead.” From severe compression to incantation, autobiography to myth, the book stakes out great extremes – and with a striking combination of detailed observation and remove, of what might be called linguistic sensuality and philosophical inquiry.
What holds all this together is an admirable precision of mind, a word that makes little appearance in the text, but informs it at every turn. You will find it throughout these pages: an essential skepticism in tandem with a largeness of vision and appetite.
